Thursday, March 19, 2015

Category Schrodinger

The post I've been waiting ages to do! The table has been completed :D

Our journey began in January this year. Hunter walked into my dining room and stopped, struck by a vision of the table that could be. He proposed the idea of building a gaming table together, and the plan spawned from there! We had a scribble of a quarter of a table on graph paper, and went into action. We figured it'd be simple: buy some wood, put it together, color it, and bam! Little did we know how much time we'd end up putting into this "little idea" of ours... but it was well worth all of it :D

Without any further ado... here's a fun photo montage of the entire process!

Bought all the wood we figured we'd need January 6th.

Chariot of wood! More dangerous than expected :d

Almost immediately after starting to use the jigsaw, Hunter broke the blade XD Thankfully, we had a circular saw on hand!

When cutting the 4x4s for the legs, they weren't all cut to the same length. While I agreed that Hunter had a good idea for getting them all cut down equally, we definitely didn't have the right tools to keep them stable enough and stuck together to hand cut them down. Ended up just making them worse :/ Finally convinced him to just let me sand them down by hand. Took awhile, but they came out well enough!

Table fully assembled!

Time for shelf doors! Have to keep the kitties out of all the stuff we can store in there :)

One of the doors wouldn't fully shut :( Ended up having to sand it down later, and now it functions beautifully!

Beautiful day to go sanding and staining!

Picked out red oak stain to go along with the oak wood! The color reminded me of a pirate ship :D

Built, stained, and poly'd! Bought chairs and a storage ottoman off of Overstock to go along with it :D Time to have gaaaaaaaaaame nights!

Had Balo over last night to celebrate with us! We drank, played board and card games, and even did some dancing when Balo shared with us that he knows Ike Ike! :) Was tons of fun!

Found out the chairs might not be the best ever- Balo leaned back at one point, and his chair nearly snapped in half! :O However, this is exactly why I paid a little extra for the protection plan. Put in a service request today, and I don't think they'll be able to fix it, so I'll already be getting a new chair!

Overall, it was a long process (just over 2 and a half months), but it was an enjoyable learning and bonding experience for Hunter and me :D Good to know that we didn't fall prey to the frustration the new Ikea-building couple did. We were able to work through disagreements and learned when to trust each other with some ideas :) Was a fantastic project... and we're both looking forward to our next!

It's also very okay to ask people at Lowe's for help. It might take awhile, but you can find some extremely nice individuals who will find your project intriguing enough to go above and beyond to assist you